Digital communication and storage of video data is a difficult task due to the sheer volume of digital data required to accurately describe a video sequence. In video, the amount of data quickly becomes very large. A block-based motion estimation algorithm is an efficient method to describe the motion between image and video data. With motion estimation, the amount of data needed to describe, for example, a video sequence may be greatly reduced, as are the demands on storage media and channels, whether internal hardware channels or communication media. Channel conditions, especially in wireless environments and in applications where significant amounts of data is exchanged, as in video conferencing, may degrade the video being placed on the channel or slow the communication if the channel conditions are not accounted for in the video encoding strategy.
MPEG-4 [4] and H.264 [5] are two of the most recent video compression codecs and standards that are widely used in video broadcasting applications. In particular, the latter has been specifically designed for video transmission over packet networks. These video standards are designed and optimized for broadcasting scenarios (server and client transmission). In particular, both MPEG-4 and H.264 have been designed as highly asymmetric codecs, where the encoder complexity is much higher than that of the decoder. Such a design enables fairly simple decoder implementations, suitable for the integration on mobile applications. However in a two-way real time communication application (such as in videoconferencing), both the encoder and the decoder need to be integrated on the same platform. Accordingly, high encoder complexity can limit application of the standards.